Life sciences infrastructure · R&D outsourcing
Science Exchange
A marketplace for ordering experiments that became procurement software for big pharma, and that sourced the laboratories for the largest public test of whether preclinical cancer biology replicates.
Christmas Eve, 2012
Eighteen months after the company launched, an investor sent the two founders an email. It landed on Christmas Eve. Science Exchange was having trouble raising a Series A and was at risk of running out of cash.
“I worry that you guys are in denial if you’re even spending time talking to investors, because in its current state this company doesn’t sound fundable,” it read. And: “I would be surprised if you can raise money. At this stage investors are looking for something that is taking off, and this isn’t.”
The founders published that email themselves six years later. By then Union Square Ventures had led the Series A, Maverick Capital a $25 million Series B, and Norwest a $28 million Series C. In September 2024 a Chicago private equity firm bought the company outright.
A fragmented $40 billion habit
Drug companies do not run most of their own experiments. They buy them. Toxicology, assay development, animal work, biospecimens, analytical chemistry: thousands of contract research organizations and academic core facilities sell these services, and each arrives with its own contract, compliance review and purchase order.
The founder’s framing in 2016: “Over $40B a year is spent on outsourced scientific research by the top 50 pharmaceutical companies alone. Much of this spend is highly fragmented across thousands of individual scientific service suppliers.”
The company’s site puts a number on the friction it sells against: onboarding one provider consumes “more than 50 hours before any work begins.” Forbes reported in 2017 that Science Exchange took a fee of between 5% and 10% and, by absorbing the contracting, could take months out of that cycle.
A cancer biologist and an economist
Elizabeth Iorns was born in Melbourne in 1980 and raised mainly in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. She took a degree at Auckland, a PhD in cancer biology at the Institute of Cancer Research in London under Alan Ashworth, then an assistant professorship at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
The idea came out of a dead end in her own laboratory. “I realized there were a lot of challenges in determining who was available, let alone who was qualified,” she told Forbes, describing a search for anyone who could run an analysis nobody at Miami could do.
She built the company with Dan Knox, an economist, and Ryan Abbott. Y Combinator took them into the Summer 2011 batch, they moved from Miami to Palo Alto, and the site went live that August. Nature named Iorns one of its ten people who mattered in 2012.
The replication project
The marketplace had a second use nobody else could offer. If you can hire any qualified laboratory in the world under one contract, you can hire it to repeat somebody else’s experiment.
In 2012 Science Exchange launched a Reproducibility Initiative with the publisher PLOS. In 2013 it partnered with the Center for Open Science on something larger: the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, funded by what is now Arnold Ventures. The plan was to repeat 193 experiments from 53 high profile cancer papers published between 2010 and 2012. The Center designed and analysed. Science Exchange sourced the laboratories.
It took eight years, and the hardest part was not the science. “None of the experiments were described in sufficient detail to design a replication without seeking clarifications from the original authors,” the project reported. About a third of author groups did not help or did not reply. Two thirds of experiments needed protocol changes because model systems did not behave as described. “Ultimately, 50 replication experiments from 23 papers were completed, a small proportion of what were planned.”
The final three papers appeared in eLife on December 7, 2021. They reported that “the median effect size in the replications was 85% smaller than the median effect size in the original experiments,” and 92% of replication effect sizes were smaller. Across five binary criteria, “46% of the replications were successful on more criteria than they failed.”
From marketplace to plumbing
The commercial story ran on a separate track. By 2016 the company said “8 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies now use Science Exchange” and that volume had grown over 500% in 2015. By 2023 Iorns put it at “fifteen of the top twenty-five pharmaceutical companies worldwide use Science Exchange.”
The product drifted with the customer. What began as a place to order an experiment became a layer on top of enterprise purchasing software, running supplier discovery, contracting, compliance, purchase orders and payment. The company calls it supplier orchestration. In March 2024 it relaunched the marketplace with about 3,800 suppliers and named Merck, Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Astellas, AbbVie and Regeneron as clients.
Six months later, on September 30, 2024, Waud Capital Partners acquired it. Terms were not disclosed. In March 2025 Science Exchange made its own acquisition, the Chicago procurement firm HappiLabs. On November 6, 2025, Iorns and Knox announced they were leaving.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Published science | Fifteen PubMed indexed papers name company staff or the project, from a 2015 Registered Report in PeerJ through three capstone papers in eLife dated Dec 7, 2021. | Public record |
| What it found | 50 experiments from 23 papers completed, 158 effects assessed. Median replication effect size 85% smaller than the original. 46% of replications succeeded on more criteria than they failed. | Public record |
| Why it fell short | 193 experiments from 53 papers selected; 50 from 23 finished. No experiment was described well enough to replicate without asking the original authors; 32% of those authors did not help or reply. | Public record |
| Named customers | Merck, Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Astellas, AbbVie and Regeneron, reported by Digital Commerce 360 in March 2024. Iorns added Bristol-Meyers Squibb in 2023. | Independent |
| Scale claims | 8 of the top 10 pharma companies (2016), over 100 enterprise customers (2019), 15 of the top 25 (2023), $1 billion cumulative volume (2026). None audited. | Company-stated |
| Ownership change | Waud Capital Partners acquired the company Sep 30, 2024, confirmed independently and by the seller’s advisor. Price not disclosed. | Independent |
| Securities filings | No Form D. EDGAR returns no registrant by this name and zero Form D hits for it, checked Sep 23, 2026, against more than $70 million in reported venture funding. | Not found |
| Series A amount | The Wikipedia entry records a $4 million Series A in 2013; the AllThingsD headline it cites reads “Science Exchange Raises $3 Million to Help Outsource Experiments.” | Sources disagree |
Read plainly: the scientific record here is solid and uncomfortable. Science Exchange helped staff a project whose main result was that most of the cancer biology it tested produced much weaker effects on repetition, and it published the whole thing. The commercial record is the opposite shape. The customer names are real and independently reported, but every number about scale comes from the company, and there is no Form D, no audited statement and no disclosed sale price to check it against.
What to watch
- Whether any outside number ever confirms the $1 billion cumulative volume figure announced in February 2026.
- What happens to the reproducibility work now that both founders have gone.
- More add-on acquisitions after HappiLabs, the usual pattern for a Waud Capital platform company.
- A first Form D, which would appear if the new owner raises co-investment into the platform.
In their words
“It was my experience of the increasing importance of access to specialized technical experts and the difficulty of finding and incentivizing the right experts to collaborate with me that led me to found Science Exchange.”
Elizabeth Iorns, Y Combinator interview, 2015 · Interview
“I would be surprised if you can raise money. At this stage investors are looking for something that is taking off, and this isn’t.”
An investor, Christmas Eve 2012, quoted by the founders, 2018 · Founder-quoted
“we had challenges at every stage of the research process to design and conduct the replications.”
Tim Errington, project leader, Center for Open Science, 2021 · Independent
“Everyone wants us to paint the project in black and white,”
Tim Errington, to Ed Yong, The Atlantic, January 2017 · Independent
“There is unnecessary friction in the research process that is interfering with advancing knowledge, solutions, and treatments.”
Brian Nosek, Center for Open Science, 2021 · Independent
“Following the successful acquisition of Science Exchange a year ago, and with the company well positioned, we’ve both decided that now is the right time to step aside and start our next chapter.”
Elizabeth Iorns, on leaving, November 6, 2025 · Founder-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordInvestigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology
- Public recordChallenges for assessing replicability in cancer biology
- Public recordPubMed set, 15 papers, 2015 to 2021
- Public recordSEC EDGAR company and Form D searches
- IndependentHow Reliable Are Cancer Studies?
- IndependentScience Exchange Takes On $28M
- IndependentScience Exchange moves into big pharma with $25 million Series B
- IndependentA B2B marketplace from Science Exchange
- IndependentWaud Acquires Science Exchange
- IndependentEffort to repeat key cancer biology experiments
- InterviewFemale Founder Stories: Elizabeth Iorns
- InterviewElizabeth Iorns on Supplier Orchestration
- IndependentScience Exchange and Elizabeth Iorns entries
- CompanyQ&A with Elizabeth Iorns and Dan Knox
- CompanyScience Exchange Announces $25 Million
- CompanyScience Exchange Caps 2025: Record Growth
- AcquirerWaud Capital Partners Acquires Science Exchange
- FounderUpdate from Elizabeth Iorns and Dan Knox
- CompanyScience Exchange website
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
